Klat: When’d the band first get together? Did you release any singles prior to the release of Yes. No. Shut it!?
Chris Gunn: We have been a band since 2000 or so. We have put out four albums on In the Red and a bunch of other singles. In the Red put out our first release which was a 7”. Touring was never that difficult geographically, the difficulties arose in other areas like alcohol consumption, anxiety, and motivation. We all worked together to write songs. This is our last tour and our last shows. Exit Dreams is our last real album and it was made knowing full well that we were going to break up.
K: Can you explain what the titles of your albums – Exit Dreams and Hobo Sunrise – are intended to mean?
CG: We have always had trouble with album titles. Look at “Yes. No. Shut it.” I cringe when I hear or read that. The story behind it makes more sense but nobody else knows it. Hart (the singer) just mumbled those words in his sleep with long pauses between all of them. We figured that he was answering questions from some version of god.
Hobo Sunrise (the title) was conceived after a night of mushrooms (magic) and yellowjackets (over the counter trucker speed). Hart and I were in my basement and the sun was coming up and I had written hobo on a mattress and he proceeded to write sunrise sometime after that. At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been called the worst album title ever on numerous occasions but in a way I like that. It certainly does sound stupid but it also made sense for us at the time (that album came out over five years ago when I was 23 and Hart was 22). We were way into Captain Beefheart and it sounded like something he might say. It seems like a lot of people just don’t get that there is a lot of humor in our music and a lot of things are very tongue in cheek. We didn’t really intellectualize “hobo sunrise” it just sounded good to two young shrooming brains. I also got the song “From this Window” off Exit Dreams from the experience of coming down that day. That was a pretty productive session I would say.
Exit Dreams (the title) can be seen in a lot of ways. We went through a lot of potential album titles and finally opted on one that is relatively serious (other possibilities were homo alone, adios amigos, go fuck yourself, drop out, round yon bend, etc.). I really hate pontificating on the meaning of something like an album title but I’ll make an exception here. The title is about the loss of dreams for one. Dreams Exiting. This album was the end of our childhood aspirations to be in a band and any other aspirations that had to do with the Hunches for that matter. It’s also about dreaming of leaving. Wanting desperately to get out of a situation (like this band or the making of this album) that you know you can’t get out of and that’s why exiting is only a dream. In a way that’s life as well. Exit Dreams are drugs, alcohol, music, or anything that takes you away for awhile. I guess another interpretation could be the things you see or dream of on the way out. Those songs were written and recorded knowing that the band was over so that knowledge and those feelings clouded and ran through everything. All of these are possible meanings but I should not be the one to tell you or anyone how to interpret something. As with most of our song and album titles, the words were put together prior to any sort of meaning. That always evolved afterwards.